Skyscraper offices at night, banks of monitors
pulsing with screensavers.

Ocean spray and drifting zoom through a rainforest,
it’s so peaceful,
this life outside a life.

Geese migrating across chilling azure skies.
Jets stacking over the hub,
firecrews on the ground.

Christs hung from their crosses,
and dust gathering in their hair.
Pyramids of tin cans on display in the boulevard aisles
of supermarket giants
and the meditative graze of slow shoppers along the shelves.

Children playing with their shadows on lawns
hurdling the translucent ropes of the water sprinkler
under golden suburban leaves,
and cars queuing for petrol in long arcing lines,
it’s so peaceful, here,
among these sounds beyond other sounds.

The dust mites trundling across white prairies of sheets.
The soldiers in their combat fatigues,
the dying looking up into mother and the sky,
it’s so peaceful.

The men on the oilrigs, and the flarestacks burning.

The rise and fall of waves.

The electric light along the sides of sleek metro trains,
the names of the stations, the names of home.

The asteroid of the virus moving through space.

The colours on the flags.

The names on the spines.

The wind moving the branches of palm trees
and of elm trees.

Smoke from the crematoria,
steam from the power stations along the river.